


Lions' Mama

by fresne



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Phyrgian Lore
Genre: Multi, Neither is a problem for the gods in question, Reference to past dismemberment inherent in the myth, Some reference to past castration inherent in the myth, Yuletide 2020, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:42:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28241835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fresne/pseuds/fresne
Summary: Kybele looked in the mad boy-man-god's eyes. Green and red and brown and decay. Fermentation. Transformation. The scream from his mouth that merged with her lions' yowls. She sighed. She told her pets, "I wish someone had been there for me as I lay on the ground screaming when others decided what was acceptable for me to be."She wrapped him in soil and took him into the earth to soften the seed of him, and brush away blue bottle chaos into change.
Relationships: Cybele/Dionysus, Dionysus/Others
Comments: 10
Kudos: 13
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Lions' Mama

**Author's Note:**

  * For [joy_shines](https://archiveofourown.org/users/joy_shines/gifts).



There was lightning to the west, but Kybele was too comfortable in her bed of earth to care about storms. She was cozy and warm. Also, slightly sore from the end of her tumultuous festival days of Hilaria. The thrumming drums that echoed on the wide plains and back again to her hills and mountains. The clanging cymbals. The reed pipes that trilled under the sound of the ulating singers. Priests. Amazons. The smell of blood and sacred cannabis. Desire and frenzy as lithe bodies leapt and pounded the earth with their feet. 

But those days were done.

Her son Attis had gone on his wanderings. The Amazon mare riders had gone to their spring camps upon the wide grass. All had been washed and renewed as it should be in the water below the earth and dross carried away to the deep sea.

She was comfortable and unwilling to move until she realized that her lions were not lounging on her feet. They were not attempting to sit on her head. They were, in a word, elsewhere. She sighed and pushed aside rippling grass and fragrant plants to find them. 

Since she was up, she laid a brief morning hand on the fruit tree that had been her cock before the gods had so unceremoniously removed it. She stroked her cock that was now a tree until the tree flowered and spewed golden pollen on the surrounding orchards. 

She left it for her priests to wait for the delirious harvest that would fruit by afternoon and went looking for her pets. 

Soon enough, she found that Léaina had treed herself. Again. Léaina looked down the long line of her nose at Kybele. Then scrambling, she turned upon the branches as if she would miraculously find that the tree was now eight feet shorter. 

Léaina turned again and again. Kybele waited patiently for her pet to mewl at her. When she did, Léaina reached into the tree and plucked her baby out. She crooned to Léaina, "I know. I know. You were stuck in a tree." Until Léaina let Kybele know with a scratch of her paws that she was more than ready to be placed upon the ground.

Immediately. 

Kybele was no shorter than the tree, but she let Léaina make the leap. They walked through the tall grass that moved with the wild wind from the west. The gods were arguing, or Titans were raging, or Kyklops were grappling, or Gigantos were fighting. None of it was anything to her.

She found Kynigós had caught a warthog and was toying with it, as if it didn't have tusks. She picked up Kynigós, and he yowled to be denied his prey. She told him. "You are too young to hunt a tusker on your own. Yes, you are." She stroked his belly while she walked. 

Skíouros was chasing his tail. No surprise there.

The greater number of her pets were napping on fallen tree branches waiting to see if the buffalo grazing nearby would forget they were there.

She sat down to watch the storm race from out over the sea into her hills. She told her pets, "You'll get wet," but they didn't listen. They lay there warm and sunny until the storm clouds raced in and dumped rain on them. A sudden refreshing cold. A reminder of winter. A spring joy.

She was laughing at their disgusted expressions after the storm passed when the god's messenger found her. He was holding a screaming bundle of a boy. The child was swarming with blue bottle flies. Vines crawled down his feet only to fall to brown decay. All around him was the miasma of death. Transformation. The Messenger held the boy out as if he was made of excrement. "Here. This is for you." 

"No, thank you," said Kybele politely. She'd learned long ago that she didn't have to accept offered gifts. Léaina rubbed against her calf until she reached down to scritch behind her ears until Léaina deigned to be picked up for pets.

"Please," said the Messenger. He launched into an implausibly plausible story about Zeus having sex with his own great-grand daughter, which resulted in a child, which made Hera jealous, which resulted in a trick where the woman died from some stupidly preventable incineration; while Zeus had also somewhat confusingly taken the shape of a dragon to have sex with his daughter, the goddess of spring, who also had a child, and then there was something with Titans rending the child and/or children limb from limb, and Zeus had to gestate the now chimeric child in his thigh to finish the pregnancy, and Hera was still jealous, and so madness. In the form of a child. Young man really. Old man. 

The chimeric god could not decide who or what he wanted to be and was brimming with chaos.

She could hardly blame him with a history like that. When he was being held like that.

But when one of Kybele's lions brought home the bloody carcass of a buffalo, she did not cradle the corpse and call it son. She looked at those corpses exactly as she looked at the screeching shape. 

"Great mother," tried the Messenger.

But she quickly said, "Your mother was a Pleiades. A Titan. I am not your mother. And when your father came calling, I turned him around again."

"A mother. You are a mother, a great mother, and as a mother you should know that this child, twice born Dionysus, is destined to conquer the people of the Indus river and bring them civilization. So...here." He put the child on the ground and ran.

Kybele told the raving god, "Given that the people who live by the Indus build great cities and you are inflicted with madness, I don't think civilization is what you'll bring." 

The child hissed and chased after her pets, who scattered at his clumsy pounce. At the spew of tangled sentences and rhymes from his lips. The spit that bred more flies. She got up to go, but Skíouros had already pounced to get the chimeric god, perhaps thinking the youthful god's horns made him a buffalo, and was now dangling by his tail from the youth's hand while all around them flies swirled. 

Kybele looked in the mad boy-man-god's eyes. Green and red and brown and decay. Fermentation. Transformation. The scream from his mouth that merged with her lions' yowls. She sighed. She told her pets, "I wish someone had been there for me as I lay on the ground screaming when others decided what was acceptable for me to be." 

She tapped the back of the mad god's hand so he lost his grip on Skiouros, who scampered away only to turn around and return, because he was her sweet idiot boy. 

She told her pets, "I owe the Olympians nothing." 

Léaina started at the motes of light in the air and chirped.

Kybele sighed. She picked up Dionysus and wrapped him in a solid blanket of earth and vines. He stopped struggling immediately. She soothed. "There now. I've got you." She carried him back to her home to settle in the dark. She shooed away his flies in the cool black. She nestled him at her breast so he could hear the beat of her heart. When he slept, she took him deeper. Into the heart of the mountain. Where great water that lay below the earth welled up. She lay him down in the water and washed him. She couldn't wash away the death and decay. That was a part of him. The part born to a mortal woman. The part gestated in the land of shades and sighs. But it was a part of her nature to cleanse and renew.

She left him there submerged under the water. Soaking. Seeds expected to be eaten and shat out the other side. Seeds expected frost and wind and heat. All to break down their barriers so they could become plants. 

She left him there to soak, while she went out to enjoy the setting sun.

Of course, when the sun left the sky, Dionysus' first mother came to her on a chariot pulled by deathless horses. The lady of spring and yet in that moment wholy the queen of the dead. "I want my son back so I can take him home."

Kybele looked at the queen, who would never get a child from her king. Who must live like a virgin in her mother's house. But now that Kybele had taken Dionysus up, she must finish what she'd begun. So Kybele asked, "And what will he do in the land of the dead? What will he do in your mother's house?"

"I'll send him to be safe in my husband's house," said that implacable lady. 

Kybele coughed politely as if to say that if even a goddess of spring and death could not keep herself safe, then that was no promise. As if to say that even the land of the dead could not promise safety. Far from it. As if to ask how the dead would drive maddness away? As if to ask what would happen in the spring and summer to a mad god in the house of sorrow?

That lady sighed. 

The only sound for a long time was a yelp from Skiouros, who had attempted to leap on a chthonic, and incidentally flaming, horse and gotten the expected result.

The relentless queen said, "Will you watch over him?"

"I expect I will for as long as he is with me." She laid a warm hand on cold skin and kissed the queen's cheek and drew a blush. "I can teach what you cannot." 

The deathless queen looked up at the weave of stars in the sky. She took her leave and Kybele's lions slept close to her that night, and therefore made early growls to be fed come the morning.

Kybele left Dionysus to soak a full seven days. She kept him surrounded by the weight of water. But not alone. Each day, she went down into the water to massage his body in the dark. When she judged he was washed as well he could be and just a bit lightly sprouted, she brought him up and with a light step, she buried him on a hillside with good drainage. He sleepily turned in her arms and sighed at the weight of earth. The ground was frosty yet. It was hard work, but she was the deity for it. 

Of course, spring was only growing stronger. Although, the lady of it did not return. But Kybele blessed her son with warm hot days. Dionysus grew wild and riotous with the sun, until she stretched him out. Spread his arms on a wood trellis. Let his roots sink into her mountain and get what bedrock wisdom lurked there. He made for strange fruit. Beautiful fruit with long lustrous hair and a luscious red mouth that longed for a kiss. She gave him kisses when the mood suited and with her tongue imparted wilder ways.

Kisses bred wise serpents to sun themselves on the rocky soil where Dionysus was planted. Swallowing rodents. Shedding their past skins and selves. Turning one or three passing travelers from male to female, and back again, until the gender they'd had at first was well and truly lost. 

When her priests came with their pruning shears so Dionysus could be snipped like they had been, as Attis, as she, Kybele told them, "Hold back." 

She became distracted by her pets and the wind whistling down off the grassy plains that came from the north. With the rising wick of the world and danced to the tune of it.

So she didn't notice the jangle of the Amazonian herders that came to graze on spring grass. Those adventurous ladies found the trellises with their shade and settled down to watch their cattle graze. To tell stories of battles won and lost. Arrows in impossible flight. Hearts pierced by love won and lost. As they did, they set aside their long sleeved tunics in the warmth of the day. Tamped down pipes with the heady leaf of their people and set to smoking. 

That was what woke Dionysus. Intoxicating smoke. That and the revelry. The dancing. The women wrestling with bodies well decorated with garments of ink and art. Music. Dionysus unwound his arms from the trellis to rest them lightly on firm shoulders. No maidens, they welcomed him. First to wrestling, then when he proved himself a god while slicked and bare, to other games. Other sanguine pleasures.

That's how she found him after, resting with his head pillowed on a breast tattooed with flowers. His hands likewise resting on flesh pricked with blocked and swirling shapes, and his feet dug lightly in the earth. She was glad to see it. Steps that were rooted could not be shaken. She threaded her way into the pile and as her priests gathered round taught him other things there on the hills of her mountain. 

Until the wind whistled up from the plains and he shivered at the searing sting of it. She stood him up and slapped his rump to set him off with purring Skíouros to find the clothing that would suit him. 

He returned to her caves with a yowling leopard in each hand. While Skíouros had lost his mane and was all over painted with spots. She clucked her tongue at her former pet, but she'd been busy herself while Dionysus had gone out. She had selected a supple branch from the tree that had been her cock. She'd cut it with no sorrow, while all around her priests shattered silent reverie with tambourines, castanets, pipes, and song. When it was trimmed, she wrapped it in ivy to give to Dionysus. 

In the third month of all this revelry, some Titans came. Because that was what Titans did. To cause trouble. Perhaps to rip Dionysus apart again and devour him once more. Titans did like devouring relatives. It could have been a great battle. There were ax wielding Amazons after all. Lions and leopards. Kybele had a chariot that might be pulled by lions if they weren't so lazy. 

Instead she said to Dionysus, "Watch what I do." She approached the Titans. They were not masters in height to herself. Far from it so far from their home and in the center of hers. 

She took hard rending hands and placed them on hilly hips. They ran into her valley thighs. She turned their heads to thoughts of delight. If one called out, "Rhea!" at a lost lover's name, and another called out, "Brimo," which was to say furious, it hardly mattered. She took their cries in as she took in their flesh and desire and hunger, and remade them. When they stumbled out of her caverns, they were Titans no more, but satyrs. Confused. Lost. More than a bit damp. 

She made a gift of them to Dionysus, who smiled behind the luxurious tumble of his hair and took them up for pleasing abuse. 

This was what they were at when his second mother arrived. 

Thyone, who had died. Thyone who had the blood of five gods in her veins when she'd been mortal Semele. Thyone who had been incinerated by her lover and was by now quite new and strange. Thyone who had gone to her son's other mother and demanded her due, and been given it. 

She wasn't alone. A brace of maenads ran wild behind her. On seeing them, the mare loving Amazonians there quite gave up their tribe and joined joyfully with them.

Then as in all things, the time of leaving dawned. 

Dionysus left her hills and plains not quietly, but in a parade. He went east. He winked and said, "It's my destiny to bring civilization to the people who live along the Indus." 

They laughed at the folly of such a thing. With one last kiss, and a slap to his rump, now draped in leopard skin, she sent him off with his chorus of wild singers, mad women, high horny satyrs, drunken priests, and delirious all. The sound echoed across her hills. 

Then growing dog day summer weary, Kybele made a comfortable hollow for herself on her hills and looked after her pets until Amazonians came to make brumal camps. For her son to come home from his wanderings, ready for pine cone burial, and winter's wait. 

**Author's Note:**

> Cybele/Kybele  
> https://www.theoi.com/Phrygios/Kybele.html
> 
> Religious Cults of the Amazons  
> https://www.amazonation.com/RC.htm  
> https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/pdf/bkf735b2415899.pdf
> 
> Dionysus and the Amazons  
> https://www.theoi.com/Olympios/DionysosMyths3.html#Amazones
> 
> Dionysus and Kybele  
> https://www.theoi.com/Olympios/DionysosMyths3.html#Kybele


End file.
